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Dr. Rasmus reviews early policy directions of newly elected French President, Emmanuel Macron, that focus on anti-labor reform, business tax cuts, and privatization and how that set of policy priorities is similar in many ways to Trump’s. How recent reports on unemployment in Europe show jobless rates at 18% (not 9.5%) while the US rate is really 9%-12% and not …

The show welcomes back guest, Alan Benjamin, an eyewitness to the recent elections in France last week, to discuss what’s going on in France. Will the right wing, Le Pen party, win in the runoff election coming up in a couple of weeks, or will the candidate backed by the French business and political elite, Macron, win? What are progressives …

Jack Rasmus invites guest, Alan Benjamin, to discuss the pending April-May elections in France. How goes France goes Europe, the saying goes. Will Le Pen’s right wing National Front Party pull off a ‘Trump Surprise’ and win the elections, pulling France out of the European Union as she promised? Will the independent Macron united the remnants of capitalist parties and right wing social democracy in the Socialist Party and win? What is the ‘united left’ in formation in France? What does it mean by ‘left frexit’. Benjamin provides a ‘on site’ analysis from his work in Europe and France today not available in mainstream media. Rasmus and Benjamin discuss the collapse of traditional social democracy in Europe as it has aligned with European Neoliberalism and the rise of both right wing populist parties and emerging left wing alternatives. The positions of all the major parties in the French election are explained. Comparisons to the UK Labor Party, Germany’s SPD and AfD, Spain’s Podemos, and with US ‘Sanders-Warren’ efforts to ‘reform’ the US Democrat party are discussed.

After the tumult of 2016, Europe could do with a year of calm. It won’t get one. Elections are to be held in four of the six founder members of the European project, and populist Eurosceptic forces are on the march in each one. There will be at least one regime change: François Hollande has accepted that he is too …

The French do not recognize ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) rejecting the idea that medicines that are usually prescribed for the condition are at all helpful. Another difference is that the French tend not to raise their children on the additive-laced food that parents in the U.S so, coincidence? These two very different cultures have different ADHD levels in children, …

The world did not end, but it changed when the United States elected a narcissistic billionaire and racist demagogue as its president. As Albert Camus once noted, “A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.” But there is no shortage of such men in politics and commerce at the moment. Donald Trump’s electoral victory says something …

Donald Trump’s election to the presidency is a devastating blow to the environmental community, coming at a crucial juncture in the fight against climate change. As Rebecca Leber and Ben Adler write for Grist, nearly all of President Barack Obama’s climate legacy probably will be undone in the Trump administration. With both Congress and and the presidency in the hands …

Staff at some of Paris’s most high-profile political and cultural offices stopped work at 4.34pm on Monday in solidarity with a protest against women being paid less than men. Women’s rights campaigners at the feminist newsletter Les Glorieuses had urged female workers to down tools from that time. They suggested that doing so until the end of the year – …

While Europe rushes to steel its external borders against an oncoming wave of migration, its internal political union is dissolving under a storm of populist nationalism. French officials’ ongoing scorched-earth demolition of the migrant camp in Calais known as “the Jungle” was a haphazard stitch on a gaping continental wound. To the east, Hungary’s recent botched referendum further underscores the …